


Before

by calathea



Category: Torchwood
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-23
Updated: 2009-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-05 01:56:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/36537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/calathea/pseuds/calathea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On a shelf in the flat he spends no time in, Ianto has a row of pictures, taken in the time before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Before

On a shelf in the flat he spends no time in, Ianto has a row of pictures, taken in the time before.

Ianto is in some of the photos; he's always grinning, wearing jeans and t-shirts from concerts he went to when he was at uni, bands he's vaguely embarrassed he used to listen to. There's one from Ibiza, Andy and Dafydd and him and a bottle of tequila, skin puffy and red, proof that Welshmen were meant for a cooler climate. A picture of a tent in a foggy field, and Lisa waving blurrily at the camera Ianto had been shivering too hard to hold steady. Lisa with his parents, outside the pub in the village he grew up in, his dad with a pint, his mum laughing at something. Dafydd again, smiling at him in front of a milling crowd of robed students at graduation.

Ianto can only see a stranger in his younger self. He can't remember what it felt like to be the Ianto he was before. Before Torchwood. Before Lisa, half-converted and screaming in terror and pain. Before his armour of suits and ties and tea trays. Before the hole that opened up in him that he just can't close.

Before Jack.

**.* . * . * . * . * .**

When Ianto was seventeen and all he could think about was sex and his UCAS form, his mother found him at the kitchen table at 3:14 am on a school night, surrounded by glossy university prospectuses and a list of pros and cons for applying to Imperial (and another list he'd hidden quickly when he heard her on the stairs: all the possibilities of what Dafydd had meant by that, and what Ianto should do now).

She'd ruffled his hair and told him that people were at their lowest ebb at three in the morning and it was no time to make a life-changing decision. She'd made him drink a glass of milk and shuffle his papers into a neat pile, and then sent him up to bed.

That was before, though, and now Ianto seemed to make all his life-changing decisions at three in the morning, or perhaps he was just permanently stuck in a world of three in the morning, no matter what the clock said.

He still made lists, but he never got to drink milk and go to bed, uncertain and reassured.

**.* . * . * . * . * .**

Ianto had never been a voyeur before, too busy living to look in curiously on other people's lives.

The problem with being, with trying to be, invisibly helpful was that sometimes you were just invisible, and you learned things no-one meant you to know. Ianto knew how Tosh could cry silently, still typing at her computer, how Gwen watched Jack when she thought no-one was looking, how Owen's fingers tunnelled through Gwen's hair when they kissed.

Ianto saw too clearly, unwillingly, all the empty spaces that Torchwood left in their lives, and all the desperate ways they tried to fill those gaps. He couldn't hate them, not even when they laughed at him for his clipboards and his infatuation with Jack. Ianto just tiptoed around his own black holes during daylight, and fell in their depths at night.

**.* . * . * . * . * .**

There had been boys before. A boy. Man, Ianto thought, with a mental apology to Dafydd. Not many of any gender, really, and no-one but Lisa from the moment he met her, no matter that it had taken six months from that first meeting to their first night together. Six months to work up the courage to talk to her, really talk, not just hello in the corridor. Six months to be her friend. Six months to become more than the geeky Welshman her friends rolled their eyes at. Six months until he shook and gasped in her arms for the first time, lying on rumpled sheets covered in blowsy purple flowers.

Gentle, dreamy Ianto. He knew how his lovers had thought of him. He'd touched with love, respect, awe at the gift he was being given by Dayfdd, by Lisa, by the one or two others in his past. If love took time, Ianto had been prepared to wait.

Jack tried to chat him up about six minutes after they met. Ianto slept with him six weeks after Lisa died. He'd never gone to bed in anger before.

He'd never fallen in love too late before.


End file.
